Policy ecology as concept and method

ABSTRACT

This article offers a policy ecology approach to assist with apprehending policy’s dispersed operations across matter, time, and space. I argue that policy is soaked into almost everything we care to analyze. Accordingly, policy analysis should not be confined to traditional artifacts and practices of governance and regulation. The primary reorientation comes with adopting an ecological approach to policy over normative understandings of what policy constitutes. To assist with containing analysis once policy becomes an unbounded object pulsing across scales, space and time, three additional prisms are offered: artifactual, ambient and hauntological modalities. Examples of how a policy ecology approach might be applied are provided, together with an account of what this framework potentially offers for those seeking to move beyond critique toward critically mindful action, in a world of rapidly compounding complexity and disruption.

KEYWORDS:

• Hauntology
• methodology
• policy
• state effect
• implosion
• artifacts

Introduction

It has become something of a commonplace in critical policy studies to acknowledge the ‘complex, contingent and contradictory nature of policy’ (Lendvai-Bainton and Stubbs 2024). Yet less attention is paid to policy’s often invisibilised dispersal in almost every context imaginable, from showering in chemically treated water, to listening to licensed broadcasters transmitting authorized news on Gaza, itself a policy-saturated bloodletting. ‘Policy ecology’ is a concept and framework enabling analysts to account for such policy immanence. It asks for a fundamental reorientation from considering policies as instruments of government alone, to thinking about policy as it is distributed, reproduced, instantiated, mystified, transacted with, and embodied across time and place, in minor to large scales. Policy ecology is an umbrella framing for understanding transitions between different modalities: here policy as a piece of paper, there an early idea still seeking coalitions for funding, outside as the road bearing traffic, or inside my body as the affordances and biome damages of food production and delivery systems freighting year-round chemically preserved bounty to retail outlets in Sydney, Australia, using trade routes secured through Anglo-American policy rearrangements of the postcolonial political economy, and agricultural systems from the plantation enslavements of now and yore.

Rather than conceptualizing policy as a relay between a governmental center and a periphery, or as a technology of bio-social classification and ordering, tethered to the political debates of a near-past to present tense register, I approach policy as always already dispersed and combined with other policies that may or may not be present and legible, as one policy-saturated condition enables, crosscuts, thwarts, and feeds another over place and time. Straightforwardly put, plural policies imbue the inherited conditions of our differentiated and entangled existences. To talk of policy ecology is thus not to speak to environmental policy per se, but to describe how we are always amid policy unfoldings. My use of the term ‘ecology’ deliberately strays beyond the sub-field ‘policies for the environment,’ which regulate pollution, waste management, extraction and rehabilitation rules, species preservation, and the like (see Parker and Haines 2018). Ecology gripped within a stereotypical biology paradigm is not the framing on offer.¹ Rather, I enlist ecology’s more expansive sense of entangled intra-active relations between living and non-living assemblies.² As Ben Tarnoff expands, ecologies ‘are full of feedback loops, cycles and flows; organisms are ceaselessly interacting with one another and with the nonliving’ (2022, 145).

Importantly, I am not alone in suggesting the term ‘policy ecology’. In his account, education researcher Marcus Weaver-Hightower applies it as an ecosystems metaphor for capturing ‘the various components that influence policy making and implementation across time’ (2008, 153), contrasting this to normative approaches which assume that policies relate to nation states, or that policies unfold in definable stages and phases. In Weaver-Hightower’s treatment (155), policy ecology centers on:

A particular policy or related group of policies, both as texts and as discourses, situated within the environment of their creation and implementation. In other words, a policy ecology consists of the policy itself along with all of the texts, histories, people, places, groups, traditions, economic and political conditions, institutions, and relationships that affect it or that it affects.

My turn to ecology broadens Weaver-Hightower’s welcome intervention, by drawing in more-than-human entanglements, conceptual and material inheritances, and the aftermaths lingering beyond the official life of any ‘particular policy or related group of policies.’ While discrete policy artifacts come and go, policies live on as institutions, infrastructures, architectures, historical precedents, rights, constraints, perceptions of the obligatory and the statutory, habits of analysis and inhabitation, all while informing the organization of social relations within families, neighborhoods, workplaces and more besides. One could accurately say that an individual is steeped within policy before gestation and after death. In other words, policy sources, impacts and legacies have tentacular material, temporal, and spatial dimensions which are not at all confined to their officially named life, which means the task of ‘following the policy’ is an inadequate probative instruction. Further, because intra-active policies are not confined to policy making citadels nor to the acts of governments but are already at large in our worlds, their myriad presences are locatable anywhere one chooses to analyze.

This liberation or everywhereness presents new challenges for analysis. When we forego the conceit of approaching policies as discrete objects of power with knowable origins and transmission systems, we instead face describing infinite multi-scalar policy worldings, a task as impossible as creating that unconscionable map of empire which exactly matched imperial holdings, inch by inch (Borges 1998, 325). To assist with parsing (while resisting a default to synchronic and centric models of policy), I further offer three figures, termed ‘artifactual’, ‘ambient’ and ‘hauntological’. Briefly, ‘policy artifacts’ describe the devices produced by networks of private and public governance to create and suppress markets, disrupt and restore order, and transect and manage populations. This is policy as it is commonly understood, presenting as written statements of intent, guidelines, restrictions or dictates that have been crafted to meet assorted needs for clarity, restriction, and direction, usually but not exclusively associated with hierarchically organized formations, and almost always centering human interests over other animate and inanimate priorities. As examples below will elaborate, policy artifacts can be studied in terms of their practices of becoming, distributions of power, wordcraft, performativity and worldmaking.

However, ecologically speaking, it is a category error to mistake policy artifacts for the fullness of policy at large. Policy inheres into our everyday environments, enabling the bulk of policy legacies to no longer appear as the result of policy determinations at all, but simply the way things are – unless discrete changes are sought, in which case, policy might be resurrected as an explicit agent from their ambient sleeper guise. The concept of policy ambience recognizes policy’s shapeshifting (appearing and disappearing) role in shaping everyday conditions, material infrastructures, expectations, dispositions, and desires. It asks us to consider the policies that are tacitly embedded in our various scapes and habitats (their compositional biographies) and in the intra-active practices of those who inhabit them, even as named policies are mostly not in view. Again, examples are everywhere one chooses to consider. Below I will call readers’ attention to a road busy with motorized traffic, as illustration; and I will elaborate some research methods that might assist in re-seeing that which has become taken-for-granted in our surroundings (see also Table 1).

Table 1. Policy Ecology Characteristics and Tactics

Mode	Key features	Possible tactics	Example approaches
Policy artifacts	Policy as legislation, regulation, rule, funded program, named intervention Cultivates ontic claims of the state Encourages evaluation	discourse analysis semiotic analysis ethnographies of bureaucratic practices theories of the performative understandings of the state effect	Carol Bacchi (2009) ‘what’s the problem represented to be’
Policy ambience (adds topographical and infrastructural dimensions)	Policy-inflected conditions in everyday movement and circumstance, sunk into surroundings, artifactual policy names/titles mostly lost	immersion and witnessing techniques mapping of topologies structural analyses of power in place actor-network and science and technology approaches	Joseph Dumit (2014) ‘implosion method’
Policy hauntology (adds temporal, spectral, ontological dimensions)	Attaches a past way of thinking (as sticky ‘ontology’) to imagined or projected futures Can make inequality seem structurally inevitable and individually pathological Can be genetic and atmospheric; can be mobilised to coerce targeted beings	sensory and attentional methods displacing analytical categories by asking ‘what else?’ heeding uncertainty attention to the latencies within ambient and artifactual policy modes	Avery Gordon (2008, 28) on the ‘elusive, fantastic, contingent, and often barely there’

Finally, the term policy hauntology gestures to the sacrifices, scars and ongoing suppressions involved in making (ambient) social configurations appear as if they are the only possible ways of being in the world, as if they are predetermined and inevitable. As all Indigenous populations can attest, this sense of destination requires that other potentialities for imagining and organizing social relations are repeatedly suppressed and cast as unviable. However, hauntology does not simply name the negative afterlives of discriminatory or aggressive policies. As I will go on to elaborate, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s original neologism, where hauntology stems from haunt-ontology (Derrida 1994, 10, 63), prior concepts, latent archetypes, moral imperatives, and civic expectations, are in our worlds and are carried forward. Past ontologies prefigure – or haunt – future configurations. If one can say the ‘extermination of Jews in Europe, and the expulsion of Arabs from their ancestral home in Palestine, are catastrophes that continue to reverberate among the respective kin of four continents’ (Zevin 2023, 5), we can also say these are policy reverberations, involving living and dead concepts and bodies, mutating across time and place, and already affecting the future. Policy hauntologies are particularly difficult to grasp. They are only partially available for empirical capture, for one thing. And they also demand intentional suspension of the statecraft categories and fetishes haunting normative policy approaches long enough to apprehend otherwise dispelled or denied phenomena. As later sections indicate, the dispelled and denied in policy analyses includes spectral and psychic experiences, ensnared futures, and the conceptual refusals of all-round human-centrism.

In essence, this article suggests ways to approach policies as technologies and symbols operating at large, in and out of micro and macro, material and immaterial sites, over time and space, giving powerful effect to the idea of predestined societal and political arrangements. I do not here attempt further explanation of the anthropogenic extractivist state effect that foundational Western policy concepts uphold³ Nor do I expand on the theoretical antecedents which pave the way for a reinvigorated approach to policy (but see Dobson forthcoming). My main objective is generating a primer for understanding and researching policy complexity through a policy ecology framing, when policy is understood to be a culturally sanctioned pursuit to s(t)imulate social order, whose material and immaterial instantiations are always wilder in practice (Lea 2020). Policy ecology attends to the conscious and instinctive intra-active relations which enable the performance effects of state functions within and between human organisms and their extended bio-organizational networks, including within and beyond officially designated sites of policy making. Policy is not external to the entanglements of daily existence but is co-constitutive within them, neither totalizing nor containable.

The framework is addressed to the many academics who think ‘advising policy’ means something foundational in terms of altering social arrangements, thereby obeying a widely accepted construct that this concessional approach is the main way to alter illogical, over-rationed, oppressive, or illiberal practices. It is also addressed to would-be policy ethnographers who want to ‘study policy’ but are misled into thinking their starting points are confined to formalized bureaucratic formations, political debates, impacted communities, or documents. These can all be generative places to start, but there is no need to stay within state-centered definitions of policy to study policy, or for that matter, to ‘influence policy,’ if by this we mean the devotional practice where earnest advisory offerings are made to priests and apostles within policy citadels. A policy ecology approach may assist to both size and seize distributed tools for activating change by decentralizing where policy is seen to be acting and thus where it might be acted upon. The key shift comes with adopting an ecological understanding of policy interdependencies and presences. How policy might then be researched and transacted with, automatically expands with this primary reorientation.

Policy ecology expanded

It helps to start with a commonplace image. Picture, if you will, a road busy with motorized vehicles, anywhere that comes to mind. Unless these policy-enabled infrastructural formations are being dug up, repurposed or subject to extensive repair (complete with signposts detailing the funding sponsors and alliterative program titles), their policy-saturated status can be taken for granted. Yet there are multiple codes and histories which have circulated between global cities dictating how roads and footpaths have their shape, width, and depth. Permitted and accepted noise levels, accident rates and vehicle pollutants have policy shaping, as do the allocation decisions, subdivisions and property contests making this or that road, this or that pavement, the provenance of this or that government, corporation, organization, business, private citizen, or no accountable body at all. That it is normal for only a slither of the could-be public space to be afforded to pedestrians or non-human animals, and then only to population subsets (sculpted by age, gender-sexuality, race, status, affluence, and able-bodiedness) are also policy entailments, based on appropriations near and far, repeat engineering constructions, and a reassertion of the ‘anthropogenic nightmare’ of our policy-enabled extractivist will over prior habitats (Harrison 2003, 9; Lutz 2014; Marriott and Minio-Paluello 2014). The social costs and extractive histories of roadscapes are so much an inhabited part of our daily experiences that they’ve lost their policy legibility altogether. They are part of a wider policy ecology.

For another example, take Shadaan and Murphy’s (2020) consideration of policy responses to the ubiquitous endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that are at large in our collective environments (such as detergents, fire-retardants, pharmaceutical by-products, sealing and caulking compounds, inks and paint additives, coolants, and lubricants, to name but a few). Having been ‘let loose’ through serial policy decisions over time, EDCs are now a moving target endangering and re-gendering visceral bodies, in utero, across lifespans, intergenerationally and intersectionally (Diamanti-Kandarakis et al. 2009). EDCs affect all kinds of bodies: young and old, black men more than white for some cancers, women more than men for others. Despite this widescale distribution, Shadaan and Murphy argue that post hoc policy responses tend to individualize the relational toxic harms of EDCs. Avoidance is made to seem a matter of consumer choice and, given the gender-class bias inherent in public health notions of individual human agency and iconic vulnerabilities, the ‘responsibility o[f] women to purchase goods that are deemed non-toxic, natural, or organic in order to seemingly avoid toxic exposures’ (2020, 5), especially when pregnant or when feeding infants. But not only do EDCs transcend the affluent consumer group that policy advice reductively targets, ‘EDCs in consumer products always come from somewhere. That is, they can be traced back through the chain of production to their manufacture and a larger disbursement of environmental violence’ (5, emphasis added). A policy ecology approach is ideal for understanding this ‘always comes from somewhere’ insert, providing a way to trace the plural policy enablements for EDCs ‘larger disbursement’ over space and time into bodies and structures within our ‘unevenly polluted worlds’ (Shadaan and Murphy 2020, 6).⁴

Metaphorically, in terms of scale and dispersion, policies are more like those EDCs, or better, like water molecules, in being convertible to singular-appearance (containable in a glass, for instance) and intangibly monumental (like the ocean); in being affected and affective as ghosts from actions past or far (as recycled molecules, as carved landscapes); helpful (potable) or harmful (intrusive, contaminated); and in being present even when there is no apparent policy existence at all (as atmosphere and terrestrial perfusion). Since there are few sites that fully escape human contact or prospective reach, there is likely no ‘outside’ to some kind of policy. Put differently, few settings avoid a policy biography of some kind, even those lying beyond the (current) thresholds of human survival. There are treaties, agreements, and laws on outer space (Hitchens, Steer, and Hersch 2020), alongside plans to exploit the wider universe; ditto the deep ocean floor (Reid 2023). In fact, when viewed ecologically, it is easier to discern multiple policy tributaries within most settings than it is to identify a non-policy-inflected situation.

However, unmooring policy in this way also means that policy presences can never be fully comprehended or described. They can only ever be captured in fragments and glimpses. Normative definitions of policy artifacts have the advantage of offering a neat approach to this obstinate challenge, whereas policy ecology offers promiscuous diffusion. The questions then become: which partial glimpses might we gear up to see, when adopting a policy ecology approach? If everything is interconnected, how can one analyze, let alone act? Addressing the first clause (analysis), the following section elaborates three figures – artifactual, ambient and hauntological policy – to re-angle analyses of policy saturations wherever one might be tracing them, without implying these perspectives or tools exhaust possibilities: they are false demarcations within always-blended arrangements.

Artifactual, ambient and hauntological policy

Policy artifacts

The policy artifact is policy manifesting in its most well-known (and most heavily caricatured) formation. These might manifest as funded and legislated rules and interpretations, or as more symbolic principles – a policy on inclusion within an organization, for example (cf. Ahmed 2012). More official definitions of policy artifacts abound. For the political scientists Theodore Lowi and Benjamin Ginsburg in their serially reissued work on American government, public policy is ‘an officially expressed intention backed by a sanction, which can be a reward or a punishment’ that can take the form of ‘a law, a rule, a statute, an edict, a regulation, or an order. It can include a law passed by parliament, a presidential or prime ministerial directive, a Supreme Court ruling, or a rule issued by a bureaucratic agency’ (1996, 607).

Artifactual policy is thus usually associated with the governance of people, things, or processes, and with discursive enactments therein. On a good day, operating within the narrative and performative rules of artifact curation can enable regulatory protections, forms of stewardship, responsibility and care aimed at ‘taming’ forces of harm against recognized vulnerabilities in people, other species, lands, and waters. Yet, as I note below, such ‘taming’ efforts are almost always in a minor key, offered as a hopeful ‘counterweight to regulation that assumes the dominance of a market-based system and the limited liability for-profit company’ (Parker and Haines 2018, 330). Once ambient and hauntological dimensions are factored in, interventions in the artifactual register begin to seem both urgently necessary and radically insufficient. This said, there are generative research approaches in the artifactual register. Let me briefly explore how.

Inspired by Foucault, for example, Carol Bacchi (2009) shows how we can critically interrogate policy artifacts in terms of what they say, what they imply, and what they omit as this ordering of self and others is conducted, using a ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach.⁵ Methodologically, WPR unpacks policy discourses, to show how certain arrangements are rendered legitimate and other possibilities unthinkable. WPR draws on deconstructive techniques to explore the way a problem is framed, who is targeted, the range of imaginable actions that might be taken, and all the alternatives that are excluded through the problematization process. Deconstructing policy artifacts as sites of classificatory knowledge and normalizing technologies has proven a productive field for many critics of social inequity and discriminatory logics. Bacchi’s rich toolkit can be usefully expanded by understanding artifacts as constituting more than the object alone; of policies being only one part of a conjuring process which necessarily also involves labor and affect. ‘Artifacts,’ Owen Smith reminds us in his essay on how to define artifacts, ‘are more than things’ (2007, 5). ‘An artifact is both a residue of making, [say] an object such as a dish, and the process by which humans make the world’ (5). That is, artifacts do not exist in isolation, but emerge in contexts of production and reception through the embodied actions of differentially agentive subjects, any part of which might be examined.

‘Differentially agentive’ is my gloss on how some of the ‘people’ involved in crafting policy artifacts have greater or lesser delegated drafting power to initiate or alter the words and purpose of policy artifacts as they bump along the multiple way stations and passage points in their becoming. ‘Differentially agentive people’ are not always policy officials. They might be policy constituencies, granted abstract involvement in policy semantics composed in the name of their purported benefit, perhaps allowed some words syphoned from consultations with representative organizations, or they might be the coordinating scribes, tasked with managing diverse versions and inputs, through negotiations, word massaging, and formatting. They may even be an individual with denotative sign-off authority (noting any such authority is already a social effect bespeaking ambient policy), signaling finalization of the policy in its artifactual guise. Within each artifact-qua-artifact sits diffractions of other policy artifacts, both as cut-and-paste words and traveling ideas.

The socio-linguist Donald Brenneis (1994, 30) has described the discursive constraints placed on explicit contributors to policy narratives, calling their inputs ‘conditionally definitive discourse, that is, apparently decisive but also rarely the final word,’ in part because of the many other interpreters, patrons, clients, and sponsors to be satisfied along the way. There are semantic considerations concerning the weight of each sentence (Göpfert 2013) and sub-textual repetitions of kindred patterns of expression and clauses within each sub-policy genre (public health being different to the language of clinical care, and both differing from that of finance, say) which in turn indicate different kinship networks and cultural questions of how genre knowledge is acquired and performed. Much emotional and performative laboring is transacted in the space between texts and talk, any part of which can be productively studied (see, for example, Ahmed 2012; Hunter 2008).

However, my use of the word ‘artifact’ is meant both as an invitation to comprehend policies materializing in their most well-understood guise and as a play on meaning. Approaching policy as if it only operates in an artifactual register is artifactual in the scientific sense of introducing a bias of interpretation. Artifacts are artifactual. As I have written elsewhere, while ‘the Vatican exists with scripture, hierarchy, ceremony, political influence, and rule-setting powers too,[this] does not contain all there is to know about Catholicism in the world’ (Lea 2020, 26). Ditto policy. While an appearance of policy centers exists which have socially conferred doctrinal powers, substituting policy artifacts for policy at large is itself an artifact (as in, an inferential bias) of statecraft. It comes from habits of analysis wherein ‘the state’ is treated as ‘a transcendental power from above’ (Lynteris 2013, 2) which, through countless acts of reification, hierarchisation and mystification, comes to appear as ‘a unified mechanism with a singular purpose and will’ (3).

In such castings, policy belongs to architectures of the monolithic state and should be analyzed accordingly. However, this immediately ignores policy’s wider cultural attributes. Take, for instance, the importance of ‘assumptions’ in giving policy any potency. As the political scientist Hal Colebatch notes, ‘policy’ has powerful meaning because people attach to it ideals about its qualities of rationality, coherence, order, and expertise (2009, 9, 24). These (ideologically and structurally reinforced) attributions are vital for policy to have any effect. That is, for rules or principles to govern collective action, they must be first ceded authority, through meshing with our expectations and desires. Michel Foucault (2011) considered this to be the signature concession of contemporary times: how governance came to be a generalized societal function such that it becomes inhabited common sense. As an abstraction, policy without a wider field of cultural endorsement has reduced enforceability.

The efficacy of calling for, scribing and mobilizing official policy artifacts relies on prior trust in policy’s substantive efficacy, together with fear of the batons and stigma awaiting persistent refusal of its normative claims. This was the late anthropologist David Graeber’s message: underlying policy’s cosmological power is our awareness that police officers are ‘bureaucrats with weapons’ (2015, 73). To nurture the liberal conceptualization that policy adjudication enables maximal autonomy and optimal protections for ‘law abiding’ businesses, organizations, and citizens (the caveat is telling), a double move takes place. Policy becomes seen as external to the self; and its omnipresence in already shaping our circumstances and seemingly private instincts and decisions made to feel so banal, it is barely legible.

An approach which only attends to the conditions of production and impacts of policy artifacts inadvertently reifies the disassociated (artifactual) ‘thingness’ of policies. This is a cultural artifact of conceptualizing policy as artifacts (as plans, as statements of intent, as instruments of governance, and so forth). A key point is that policies do not, cannot, exist on their own. Even in their most confidently artifactual form (as ‘black letter’ laws⁶ and funding appropriations, for instance), policies do not emerge miraculously without multiple human and more-than-human enrollments. Policy ecology clearly joins accounts which acknowledge that policy transactions are always relational (Forsyth 2022; Hunter 2008). Here, we should note that policy relations are not simply those operating between a passive artifact called ‘policy’ and discrete human beings, or between people and material things like printers and desktops. Relationally speaking, humans and objects are not self-enclosed, and neither is policy.

Artifactual policy thinking is also one which proclaims that evidence drives policy, despite the irony that policy is evidently also a game of chance, political opportunism, cultural embeddedness, contradiction and adhockery (Ball 1993). Artifactual policy academics tend to prize questions of evaluation and often assume a sagacious authority of some kind sits behind often lamented ‘unintended consequences’ which can be amended with better data and sharper critique. Such pursuits are both worthy and pragmatically naïve, in according too much faith in a hierarchical and centric model of rational policy making, a model which is more aspirational than actual (see Dobson forthcoming). Treating policy artifactually is itself an artifact of chrono-normative habits of linearizing time to feign correctable systems of governance that the critic somehow voluntarily sits outside of, able to deny the intra-active ‘made upness’ of state edifices (see Clarke forthcoming). Viewed ecologically, neither the state nor policy have any perfectible unity to begin with, and externality is a fiction. This said, the boundary making processes involved in making policy appear as a singular object, out of its ‘policy multiple’ guises, could be a fruitful approach to the artifice of singular policy artifacts (cf. Mol 2003).

Policy ambience

Ambient policy is the most neutral seeming of the three policy figures under discussion, which is not to say ambient policy acts neutrally. It is unspectacular, in that it seldom announces itself as policy. Ambient policy refers to the conditioning policies embedded in and shaping everyday worlds. It is a different way of describing the countless overlapping material and figurative policy grounds for one’s surrounding conditions in any contemporary moment, from the mundane to the world historical. I leave my contractually rented apartment and head down the stairs, my limbs and torso able to anticipate the depth and width of each riser, for these conform to stipulated criteria that, as an affluent urbanite in a metropolitan city leasing room in a modern building, I am habituated to. The quotidian policy layers in my surroundings – the regulated buildings; the river sand-turned-to-concrete; the ragged-edged dark portals leading to underground water and sewer systems; the pole-to-pole draping of electricity wires; the sky with its invisible barbwire grids of no-fly and go-fly zones; the satellites orbiting the exosphere to relay my communications and re-route my disorientation – recombine to shape my conditions of existence. This miscellany of welcome and unbidden, jarring and unnoticed, hostile and friendly policy formulations is simultaneously global and situationally specific. It is always, to use Povinelli’s term,‘ hereish’ (2017); an immanence connected to many elsewheres.

If artifactual policy thinking approaches policy in the singular as a tool for remediation, ambient policy asks that we consider policies as embedded in our ‘hereish’ surroundings and their stories of becoming. Even conventionally isolated policy artifacts can become subject to an analysis of their ambient conditions of possibility, as examples above indicate. Methodologically, ambient policy is open to multiple deconstruction, witnessing and immersion practices. The anthropologist Joseph Dumit (2014) provides an elegant schema for following connections, by starting simply with a chosen item (he instances a pill, a pencil, a piece of text; policy openers are likewise infinite). Dumit wanted to help students start to re-see connections they take for granted or fail to see within almost everything they encounter. Such ordinary, daily, suppression is epistemological and psychosocial: we screen out the unbearable and intolerable conditions subtending existence, to continue apace, and because, Allen Feldman (1994) separately argues, of widescale and highly mediated cultural anesthesia.

To clarify the importance of this inuring and what it deletes from perception, Dumit calls on Gilles Deleuze’s hope that avant garde cinema might ‘jam or break’ how people ordinarily unsee the ‘powerful organization of poverty and oppression’ in daily life (Deleuze 1989, 20). As Deleuze further explains:

We do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands … [our sensory-motor schemata arranges] for turning away when it is too unpleasant, for prompting resignation when it is terrible and for assimilating when it is too beautiful. (1989, 20)

Dumit brings Deleuze’s desire to interrupt blind sensory habits together with Donna Haraway’s (1989) call for exactingly situated knowledge building, to provide tactics for re-seeing ‘the embeddedness of objects, facts, actions and people in the world and the world in them,’ with an emphasis on details and nonobvious connections (2014, 350). Dumit offers techniques for schematically rendering or resurfacing details that have been bypassed because of inhabited or socially ordained ignorance. To commence any ‘implosion project,’ he suggests starting with whichever object one cares to pursue and asking how it got here? What is in it? What kinds of labor and what kinds of transformations does it embed? The key condition is a commitment to specificity when asking how the world is in the chosen starting point and how it is in the world. Pursuing these questions will fertilize new clusters and links to repeat the process with. He goes on to list the questions and modes of inquiry to be applied in generating empirically grounded stories that do not pretend to be views from God, but neither are they oblivious to intra-connectedness. For the purposes of his pedagogical exercise, Dumit advises students to stop at three widenings, at least in their first round. Applied to policy ecology, one could start anywhere and stop when idiosyncratic impulses, analytic exhaustion, or such imposed constraints as a word limit suggest an abandonment point.

Applied specifically to ambient policy explorations, the implosion method could identify the policy presences imbuing any here-and-now scenes. For more dedicated attention to the ineffable features Dumit gestures to via Deleuze, policy hauntology may assist.

Policy hauntology

Policy hauntology captures policy scars inside people’s bodies and souls, the material and immaterial consequences of past and present-day policy decisions haunting ambient conditions, and the tethers binding imagination and exegesis. That policies from the past haunt the present and the future (as historical derangements, as downstream effects, and as ontological bindings, all at once) is swiftly illustrated by the existence of nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and related containment attempts of the Nuclear Energy Agency through artifactual policies for storing hazardous waste (NEA 2020). Over six kilometers below the desert of New Mexico, a huge complex is designed to contain long-lived radioactive waste. Developing infrastructures that remain safe and secure against environmental assaults for thousands of years is difficult enough (cf. Ialenti 2021).

But even dug in, sealed, and closed, how will the buried dangers be knowable thousands of years from now? Could human ancestors before now have successfully prohibited today’s populations from ransacking the allure of a sealed enclave? It cannot be assumed that current danger symbols or lexicons will remain comprehendible and convincing for unknowable and linguistically foreign future sentient species about the deathly hazards of (policy-authorized) buried radioactive material. Policy ghosts imbuing nuclear power and waste disposal are suspended in a time warp of ageless potential risk in raid-worthy bunkers. Artifactual policy interventions require imaginative casting forward from the constraints of current epistemologies to somehow meet the semiotic challenge of ‘how to remember a place to forget’ (Mazzucchelli and Novello Paglianti 2022).

Joining British citizenship applicants in a waiting room, Ann-Marier Fortier (2016) notices the nail biting, trembling limbs, and tense expressions of those readying themselves for the exam and connects this to how state power is both experienced and executed. ‘Anxiety,’ she argues, ‘is an enduring feature of the state-citizen relationship’ (8). The anthropologist Patrick Horton takes readers to separate scenes of waiting, where a group of Indigenous people rest in shade under a tree near a highway, casually recounting who among their number are still in gaol. The Northern Territory of Australia, he relates, boasts the highest incarceration rates in the world, and ‘84% of its prison population is Indigenous (while making up a quarter of the general NT population)’ (Horton 2022, 36). Given its omnipresence, no Indigenous person can escape the specter of hyper-incarceration: it ‘emerges in mundane, novel and terrifying apparitions in … everyday lives’ (37). In Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (2014), Lisa Stevenson reveals the inescapable incorporation of settler colonial policy in bodies and psyches within the specificity of suicide and the generalized expectation of uncanny death among Inuit peoples. Her book is full of the hauntings of committee rooms, people numb(er)ing, assimilation cruelties, institutional barbarism, and the continued lives of that which is declared dead, past policies included. Stevenson notes: ‘our contemporary worlds are often haunted by the colonial in ways we do not fully understand’ (4).

Fortier, Horton, and Stevenson differently draw attention to attributes of policy-laden moments that some may call affect, or the psychic dimensions of inhabitation within extractive and rapacious worlds. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s (1994) neologism and Avery Gordon’s work (1997), I prefer ‘policy hauntology.’ Derrida was initially addressing an international group of scholars who, amid triumphalist declarations that socialist possibilities were dead after the fall of the Berlin wall, asked whither Marxism now? There is no finale, Derrida expanded in the book which followed. Marxian concepts are so integral to the cultural memory of modernity that analysts cannot proceed without them, acknowledged or not: ‘At a time when a new world disorder is attempting to install its neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts’ (Derrida 1994, 45–6). Indeed, no idea is pure unto itself, but both reproduces prior concepts and operates as a talisman against that which it wants to expel or repress. ‘Ontology’ is an incantation against this haunting: cue ‘hauntology’ (202). For Derrida, every promotion of ‘neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism’ (46) is also a suppression of alternatives. To paraphrase, we might see every policy artifact and materialization as also haunted by that which it is warding off, as casting incantations against feared alternate possibilities.⁷

Since Derrida’s intervention, notions of haunting and spectrality have proliferated. As Jean Langford (2013) writes,

Spectrality has been a well-traveled metaphor in recent years, appearing at times in discussions of economy as a metaphor for commodities and speculative forms of value, but even more often in discussions of historical memory and forgetting, as a metaphor for past injustices whose repressed effects persist in the present. (2013, 209)

The repressed effect of past injustices is Avery Gordon’s concern in her groundbreaking work Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997). Gordon was concerned with giving expression to the privations of racialized capitalism and militaristic, monopolistic state violence as these come together in the bodies and minds of real people. She too faced the dilemma Deleuze (1989) was troubled by, of articulating the enormity of unbearable experiences embedded in our worlds, and of the wounds people carry in cells, souls, and attributed dysfunctions. Such dimensions are poorly understood through resorts to disciplined survey tools or standard categories for understanding power relations. Confronting her ‘stammering and inchoate suspicions and disappointments’ with prevailing sociological approaches to ‘the injurious and dehumanizing conditions of modern life’ (1997, 194), Gordon turned to fictional works. In Toni Morrison’s and Luisa Valenzuela’s cold-blooded yet lyrical words, she finds ways to ‘recover the evidence of things not seen … the living effects, seething and lingering, of what seems over and done with, the endings that are not over’ (195).

Step-by-step research methods to resist flattening and foreshortening hauntological effects are difficult to prescribe. The concept refers to the traces of past policy decisions lingering in minds and surroundings, and to habits of analysis within knowledge gathering and narrative genres which reinforce policy categories; habits which, in the academy at least, enable circulation of peer-reviewable exegesis (among other effects). It is no coincidence that key thinkers turn to creative genres to attempt escape: Donna Haraway to science fiction (1989, 370); Deleuze to cinematic interventions that might loosen sensory-schemata from the grip of prescribed ways of seeing and interpreting experiences; Gordon to Indigenous, LatinX and Blak writers to think of embodied legacies. However, while writing to express something of the caliber of policy hauntology requires commitment to rich description, writing lyrically won’t suffice.

For innumerable reasons, comprehending that which eludes trained perception, that is denied any existence and is hard to know, is an impossible practice. Lisa Stevenson describes her practice as listening, ‘regardless of whether it makes sense … being attentive to – even opening oneself to – those moments when facts falter and when things (and selves) become, even just slightly, unhinged’ (2014, 2). In a sense, the struggle to think with the aid of interpretive devices – critical theories and insistently tracing the residues of blood in the ruthless concrete pavement – is the method. The ‘method’ is to deploy stratagems for displacing codes and modes of analysis that are themselves inherited axioms; axioms that haunt the constant struggle for adequate description. Marisol de la Cadena (2021) advises the most critical thing is to lean into not knowing. Not knowing is no waystation en route to full knowing, but ‘a way to practice analysis’ (254). I would add that not knowing is no prescription for giving up. To mis-cite Fredric Jameson, while ‘[t]here are good reasons for thinking that all these questions are undecidable: which is not necessarily a bad thing provided we continue to try to decide them’ (2005, xiv-iv).

Combining the figures

Let’s go on the road again. Pursuing policy artifacts, the researcher might look for the different covenants, land title arrangements, funding appropriations and permit systems which orchestrate the physical arrangements of the street. Thinking about policy ambience, what is foreign or familiar, new or ancient, altered or unwavering, are possible vantage points. They might also look at the histories of the land – perhaps it was an estate, a farm, an uncleared forest, a hunting way, or a swamp – to consider the land as always having different destinies, which policy helped rearrange, introducing a formidable policy insistence on privatized property in the bargain. In considering the multispecies inclusions, exclusions, lives, and deaths in these histories, branch out to the extraction industries which subtend the conversion of river sands into concrete, crude oil into tar, earth beds into gravel quarries (Marriott and Minio-Paluello 2014). All are policy saturated entailments, that have become so naturalized, so ambient, within the streetscape, they are no longer accorded formal policy presence but haunt possibilities and actions even so. Spatial bulk is conceded to motorized vehicles, with all the associated degradations of physical movement, excision of viable life for other beings, aggravation of heat from dark bitumen roads in warming worlds, and tolerance of premature trauma and death that accompanies this mighty concession (Truscello 2020).

Picture a naive toddler blithely stepping onto the road. Why might a caregiver forcibly yank that child from the curb, blood screaming ‘NO!’ but for a seemingly pre-cognitive knowledge that this policy-enabled fast-moving metallic world demarcates where and how fleshly bodies are allowed to move? Policy hauntology refers to this psychosomatic knowledge and its eruptive potential, and to policies that also haunt – as in, silently inhabit – reimaginations of built environments by tying possibilities to axiomatic configurations (preventing roads from being jackhammered in favor of rewilding, for example).

Placed together, the commonplace road-sidewalk arrangement diffracts multiple pasts and futures, deaths and lives, with all parts related to wider tributaries: of crude oil, sand and gravel extraction; of cadastral technologies with their imperial suppression of prior tenure systems; of the profit and debt models embedded in our car-mediated social worlds; of air contamination becoming individualized breathing disorders and cancers; of microplastics ending up in marine life and back into humans; of road carnage becoming trauma surgery, organ transplants and prosthetics; and of lifelong socialization on comportment in an authorized necro-scape. We might even think of roads as being akin to policy artifacts, inviting us to share an illusion about their solidity when, in terms of physics, they are more a ponderous liquid in a constant state of motion, and thus in a constant state of dissolution – which other policies intervene in, perhaps in the wee early hours, when laborers (the road’s policy makers) add boiling pitch and fire-hot sand into potholes, leaning on more-than-human policy-enabled relationalities to do so.

Why bother?

Policy ecology helps meet the challenge of how to approach policy in multi-dimensional and mutational terms in and out of bodies; between humans and non-human matter; as contained and porous; historically specific yet dispersed; as soaked in environments and shaping contexts and futures; as enthralled by conceptual ghosts and haunted by cruelties and expulsions. But why bother, especially since policy analysis as conventionally defined has the conferred advantage of instrumentality and purposefulness? In conclusion, I offer four counter-reasons, which are really one reason packaged in different ways: (1) verity; (2) action; (3) interest; and (4) necessity.

1. Verity. This is a very humble argument in favor of improved specificity. Every call for identity rights, or to hold the mining industry to account for leakages and waste, for instance, are calls for some kind of artifactual policy: an observable or graspable materialization of a demarcation evidenced in written, funded, and enacted commitments. It behooves us to think more critically about the dispersed phenomena we are turning to when we plead for ‘better policy’ or when we feign that our investigations will inform this vague destination. The inchoate hope that bearing witness to egregious and harmful phenomena will somehow prompt action by influencing ‘policy’ is itself a description of a policy entailment, or an epistemological haunting, within research communities. As noted, there are decided times when reworking policy artifacts inside our organizational constructs mitigate damages, confers benefits, provides protections. But while this reification is strategically necessary, when policy is not approached ecologically, remedial recommendations can only seek marginal improvements to the savage configurations we are bio-socially dependent upon.

2. Interest: Related to greater specificity, an ecological approach should open fields of analysis to a greater diversity of thinkers, who currently approach policy as something that sits outside their more creative or theoretical endeavors. This is to cede rather than seed the grounds of analysis. How many more astute and interesting analyses could be generated if we stopped associating ‘doing policy’ with dull prose and dreary categorizations and focused instead on the impossible and stupendous quest of grappling with the policy saturated surrealities we are always enmeshed in?

3. Action. When we decentralize where policy is acting, we decentralize where we can act on policy. If policy is always part of what we are inhabiting in the everyday, part of our ambient and inherited surrounds, then the obstacles that are pushed through and manipulated in altering one’s conditions are always also policy encounters. This expands activation possibilities along the many tributaries that are not conventionally denoted as ‘policy’. Describing the need to deprivilege the ontic status of ‘capitalism’, Max Liboiron puts it this way:

Often I hear scholars and activists alike talking as if capitalism (or patriarchy or racism, but mostly capitalism) is a solid monolith that we must dash our soft bodies against, to little avail. But that characterization gives capitalism and colonialism more power than they merit by erasing not only their diversity, but also the patchiness, the unevenness, and the failures of those systems to fully reproduce themselves. It erases the other kinds of economies and L/land relations that happen within, alongside, and in spite of capitalism, the university, and colonialism. So let’s not. (2021, 130)

• (4) Necessity: planetary limits are being breached; solutions rely on science fiction (Anderson 2015). The three prisms of artifact, ambience and hauntology may help others who are equally attracted to exploring policy as a potential field of action without overloading ‘policy’ with a fantastical responsibility for progressive resolution. The possibilities for enacting change lie all around us; but not in blind faith in the efficacy of policy artifacts alone to alter rapacious carbon lifeworlds.

Acknowledgments

This article came into shape via late night workshops with Rachael Dobson’s Policy Ontologies group, across the time and space differences of the United Kingdom and Canada, and later, of the UK and Australia. Iterations of the paper predate the group but Rachael’s patient insights and related dialogues with Shona Hunter, John Clarke, and Hanna Hilbrandt, mobilised it into being.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Tess Lea

Tess Lea is an anthropologist who specialises in the analysis of Indigenous navigations of interventionary logics under continuing settler occupation in Australia, tracking how benefit is tied to administrative entanglement. This is explored in her latest book, Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention (2020, Stanford University Press).

Notes

1. I prefer ecology to ‘ecosophy’ as coined by Félix Guattari (2000), although I join his attempt to commandeer the meaning of ‘ecology’ from notions of an environmental container and toward a plurality of material and immaterial relations intra-acting over time and place, which shape us and which we shape.

2. Karen Barad argues that the term ‘interaction’ should be replaced with that of ‘intra-action’ to signal ceaselessly dynamic exchanges and influences within and between organic and non-organic phenomena, without which we do not exist. ‘“Distinct” agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements’ (Barad 2010, 267).

3. A fuller development minimally requires an account of subjectivity, consciousness, and desire in the relation between policy and state effects; and theories of variation, friction, and rupture (as in, how might statecraft enclosures be transgressed?). Briefly, many theorists argue that a coherent superordinate authority system does not truly exist, nor do the institutions that lay claim to this authority organize social relations toward the ‘greater good’ – but our desire for the reassurance of assuming such a system exists, creates the impression that it does (Hansen et al. 2001; Lynteris 2013).

4. Shadaan and Murphy build on the work of Red River Métis environmental scientist Max Liboiron (2021), who similarly discusses the ‘threshold theory of pollution’ which informs many policies on radiation and contamination. The threshold theory is ‘premised on the logic of assimilative capacity, in which a body – water, human, or otherwise – can handle a certain amount of contaminant before scientifically detectable harm occurs’ (2021, 5). This not only reflects colonial policy expectations that land, water, and fish, are not living kin with whom we are in good or bad relations, it also denies the uneven distributions of plastics pollution within and between human bodies (see also Rhodes 2019) .

5. See https://carolbacchi.com/page/for WPR tools (last accessed 16 October 2023).

6. I am aware that some policy and legal scholars would distinguish policy from law, when partitioning the artifacts of policy worlds. Such boundary work belongs to policy artifacts in-the-making.

7. Indigenous scholars have argued that settler colonial policy ontology is an ongoing project to counteract the haunting of Indigenous sovereignty. Settler policy tries to expel Indigenous refusal of its foundational contentions (Simpson 2017, 19).